This DLB volume supplements Volume 2 with 70 additional biographical entries covering American novelists actively writing during this period of extraordinary proliferation for the literary form. Among them are 'interesting new talents...and many others of striking quality,' writes William Targ in the volume's foreword. There is also '...ample assurance of a new body of risk-takers, stylists and nontraditionalists,' he continues. Indeed, here we have the whole spectrum of writing talent.
70 entries include: Eleanor Clark, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edward Hoagland, Peter Matthiessen, James A. Michener, Toni Morrison, Mario Puzo, Isaac Bashevis, Singer Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Joseph Wambaugh and Jessamyn West.